Centre for Internet and Society

Internet Governance Forum

anirudh — 2013-12-03T10:29:30Z

Anirudh Sridhar provides an analysis of the creation of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), its structure, and the importance of IGF in this unit.

Introduction

IGF can be best described as the Forum which brings "people together from various stakeholder groups as equals, in discussions on public policy issues relating to the Internet. While there is no negotiated outcome, the IGF informs and inspires those with policy-making power in both the public and private sectors. At their annual meeting delegates discuss, exchange information and share good practices with each other. The IGF facilitates a common understanding of how to maximize internet opportunities and address risks and challenges that arise.

The IGF is also a space that gives developing countries the same opportunity as wealthier nations to engage in the debate on Internet Governance and to facilitate their participation in existing institutions and arrangements. Ultimately, the involvement of all stakeholders, from developed as well as developing countries, is necessary for the future development of the Internet."[1]

Creation of IGF

As it has been mentioned, IGF was first conceived in the Tunis Agenda. Article 72 of the Tunis Agenda laid the foundation of IGF. Article 72 lays down the mandate of the IGF. It asks the UN Secretary General to put in place an open and inclusive process and to convene a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue which would be known as IGF.

Past IGFs

The first IGF was organized in 2006 in Athens. Since then it has been held each year in various locations. In has been held in Rio de Janerio in 2007, Hyderabad in 2008, Sharm El Sheikh in 2009, Vilinius in 2010, Nairobi in 2011 and Baku in 2012. The IGF in 2013 is to be held in Bali.

Overarching themes at IGFs so far:

2006 and 2007 – Internet for development"
2008 – Internet for All
2009 – Internet Governance and creating opportunities for all
2010 – Developing the Future together
2011 – Internet as a Catalyst for Change: Access, Development, Freedoms and Innovation 2012 – "Internet Governance for Sustainable Human, Economic and Social Development".

The 2013 IGF has found strong support for two themes, "Building Bridges" and "Enhancing Multi-stakeholder Cooperation for Growth, Development and Human Rights".

Apart from the over-arching themes, it focuses on certain themes which have been discussed across all the IGFs:

Human Rights/ Freedom of speech
Security, Cybercrimes
Spam
Data protection and privacy
Consumers Rights, Network Neutrality
Intellectual Property Rights
Development (issues related to digital divide)
Open Standards
Capacity Building
Issues related processes and principles
E-commerce and e-governance

Structure of the IGF

The Secretariat of the IGF is based in the United Nations. The main function of the IGF is to coordinate with and assist the work of the Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group (MAG). The MAG was first set up by Kofi Annan, Secretary General of UN in 2006. The main function of the MAG is to decide upon issues and themes which need to be addressed in each IGF. The MAG comprises of representation from all stakeholders and all regions.

The forum organizes and accommodates plenary sessions, workshops, open forums and best practices forums.

Dynamic Coalitions: The concept of dynamic coalitions was conceived in the first IGF in Athens, which are informal and issue-specific. It comprises of members from different stake holder groups. Currently there are ten active dynamic coalitions, for example, Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability, Internet Rights and Principles, and Child Online Safety, etc.

Importance of IGF

One of the main critiques of the IGF is that the outcomes of the IGF do not have any binding effect on the participating governments, industry, non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations. But such a process is said to discard the involvement of multi-stakeholder through use of coercive power which is the main feature of government regulation. In this regard, Jeremy Malcolm notes:

"The IGF’s output is explicitly “non-binding,” which means that the participation of states in the IGF process does not involve the use of coercive power as is a typical feature of government regulation. In fact since the process is to be “multilateral, multi-stakeholder, democratic and transparent” with “full involvement” of “all stakeholders involved in this process,” governments do not, at least in principle, enjoy any position of pre-eminence in policy formation through the IGF. Neither should they, if the IGF’s legitimacy and effectiveness are to be assured."[2]

[1]. What is Internet Governance Forun available at http://bit.ly/IIwXNu.

[2]. Jeremy Malcolm, Multi-stakeholder Governance and the Internet Governance Forum, Terminus Press, 2008 at pp. 3.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/internet-governance-forum

World Summit on Information Society (WSIS)

anirudh — 2013-12-01T03:12:27Z

The United States had the control over internet resources and its administration was controlled by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. This was the principle agency in the US dealing with telecommunication and information policy and the ICANN managed the internet domain names and IP addresses.

ICANN and indirectly the US government having control over the domain name system and the internet registry was an issue of concern for the rest of the world as well international organizations. The proposal for the WSIS by the United Nations was the reaction to such a concern.

Origins of the WSIS

The World Summit on Information Society was first proposed by the International Telecommunication Union in 1998. The main focus of the WSIS was to address issues related to the global digital divide. However, the scope of the WSIS was broadened later to include internet related public policy issues. The UN General Assembly approved the Summit in 2001[1] which was to be held in two phases. The first phase was held in Geneva from December 10-12, 2003 and the second phase was held in Tunis from November 16-18, 2005. The main aim of the Geneva Summit was to lay down a road map to building an information society accessible to everyone. The Tunis Agenda was more on the lines of developing a mechanism or framework which would be effective in dealing with management of the internet public policy issues.

Main Goals of the WSIS

At the beginning the main objective of the WSIS was to discuss issues on building better telecommunication and information infrastructure in the developing nations to bridge the digital divide. The self adopted purpose of the WSIS was, "to harness the potential of knowledge and technology to promote the development goals of the Millennium Declaration."[2] However, during the meetings the focus of the WSIS was broadened and it covered not only issues related information infrastructure but also various issues related to communication and other public policy issues such as freedom of speech, privacy, etc.

Geneva Summit

The Geneva Summit saw overwhelming participation from the government, civil society, industry, international organizations and media. Nearly 11000 participants attended the Summit. The Geneva Summit of WSIS was supposed to mainly focus on principles and the Tunis Summit was envisioned to deal with implementation of principles and follow-up mechanisms. Though the Geneva Summit failed in reaching a consensus on the issue of the future of internet governance, there were two major outcomes of the Summit; the Geneva Declaration of Principles and Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG).

Geneva Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action

The Plan of Action focused on information and communication infrastructure and recognized it as the essential foundation of the information society. It also emphasized on the importance of access to knowledge, capacity building and building of an enabling environment. It was also cognizant of cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and development of local content.

One of the key features of the Geneva Summits was that it recognized the principles of multi-stakeholderism. The Geneva Declaration of Principles while recognizing the principles of multi-stakeholderism stated,

"Governments, as well as private sector, civil society and the United Nations and other international organizations have an important role and responsibility in the development of the Information Society and, as appropriate, in decision-making processes. Building a people-centered Information Society is a joint effort which requires cooperation and partnership among all stakeholders."

The Geneva Declaration of Principles also laid down principles related to role of ICT in development, access, human rights and international and regional cooperation.

WGIG

The main functions of the WGIG included:

To “develop a working definition of Internet Governance
Identify the public policy issues that are relevant to Internet Governance
Develop a common understanding of the respective roles and responsibilities of governments, existing international organizations and other forums, as well as the private sector and civil society in both developing and developed countries.”

The final report of the WGIG divided issues related to Internet Governance in four sections:

Infrastructure
Privacy, security and safety on the internet
Intellectual property and international trade
Development

Tunis Summit

The Tunis Summit resulted in the agreement on the Tunis Commitment, Tunis Agenda for the Information Society and the birth of the Internet Governance Forum. The Tunis Agenda and Tunis Commitment were the consensus statements at the Tunis Phase of WSIS whereas the Internet Governance Forum was created as a multi-stakeholder platform for policy dialogue on internet related public policy matters.

The Tunis Commitment confirmed the agreement on Declaration of Principles among the stakeholders as well as reaffirmed the Plan of Action.

Tunis Agenda

The Tunis Agenda recognized the need to, "move from principles to action, considering the work already being done in implementing the Geneva Plan of Action and identifying those areas where progress has been made, is being made, or has not taken place."[4]

It also reaffirmed the, "commitments made in Geneva and build on them in Tunis by focusing on financial mechanisms for bridging the digital divide, on internet governance and related issues, as well as on implementation and follow-up of the Geneva and Tunis decisions."[5]

The two other important parts of the Tunis Agenda were sections on:

Financial mechanisms for meeting the challenges of ICT for development
This part of the Tunis Agenda generally focussed financing infrastructure and equipment for providing better access to the internet in the developing areas.
Internet Governance
The section on Internet Governance dealt with management of the internet in a multilateral, transparent and democratic process with full involvement of governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations.

Article 35[6] of the Tunis Agenda reaffirmed that the management of the internet shall take place in an inclusive and consultative process.

The third and the most important outcome of the Tunis Summit was the creation of the Internet Governance Forum. It was set up under Article 72 of the Tunis Agenda. The next section will deal with the Internet Governance Forum.

[1]. UN General Assembly Resolution 56/183 (December 21, 2001) available at http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/background/resolutions/56_183_unga_2002.pdf

[2]. See more at http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/wsis-themes/UNMDG/index.html

[3]. Château de Bossey, Report of the Working Group on Internet Governance at pp. 3 available at http://www.wgig.org/docs/WGIGREPORT.pdf

[4]. Introduction, Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, WSIS-05/TUNIS/DOC/6(Rev. 1)-E, November 18, 2005 available at http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs2/tunis/off/6rev1.html.

[5]. "Policy authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of States. They have rights and responsibilities for international Internet-related public policy issues. The private sector has had, and should continue to have, an important role in the development of the Internet, both in the technical and economic fields. Civil society has also played an important role on Internet matters, especially at community level, and should continue to play such a role. Intergovernmental organizations have had, and should continue to have, a facilitating role in the coordination of Internet-related public policy issues. International organizations have also had and should continue to have an important role in the development of Internet-related technical standards and relevant policies."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/world-summit-on-information-society

Internet Engineering Task Force

anirudh — 2013-12-01T02:34:23Z

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is an open standards body with no requirements for membership and does not have a formal membership process either.

It is responsible for developing and promoting Internet Standards. Internet Standards are technological specifications which are applicable to the internet and internet access. The IETF also closely works with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standard setting bodies. It mainly deals with the standards of the Internet Protocol suite (TCP/IP) which is a communication protocol used for the internet.

The mission of the IETF is to, "produce high quality, relevant technical and engineering documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the internet in such a way as to make the internet work better."[1]

Structure

The IETF consists of working groups and informal discussion groups. The subject areas of the working group can be broadly divided into the following categories:

Applications
General Internet
Operations and Management,
Real-time Applications and Infrastructure,
Routing,
Security, and
Transport

The working groups are divided into, areas as mentioned above and they are managed by area directors.

IETF Standards Process

The process of developing Standards at the IETF looks simple but faces certain complications when put into practice.

A specification for a internet standards goes through a period of development followed by reviews by the community at large. Based upon the reviews and experiences, the specifications are revised and then the standards are adopted by an appropriate body after which it is published.

"In practice, the process is more complicated, due to (1) the difficulty of creating specifications of high technical quality; (2) the need to consider the interests of all of the affected parties; (3) the importance of establishing widespread community consensus; and (4) the difficulty of evaluating the utility of a particular specification for the internet community."[2]

The main goals of the Internet Standards Process are:

Technical Excellence;
Prior Implementation and Testing;
Clear, Concise, and Easily Understood Documentation;
Openness and Fairness; and
Timeliness[3]

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

W3C is a multi-stakeholder organization that involves groups from various sectors including multi nationals. W3C is also an international community dedicated to developing an open standard, "to ensure the long term growth of the web". It is led by the inventor of the web — Tim Berners-Lee.

The guiding principles of W3C"[4] are:

Web for All
The W3C recognizes the social value of the internet as it enables communication, commerce and opportunities to share knowledge. One of their main goals is to make available these benefits to all irrespective of the hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.
Web on Everything
The second guiding principle is to ensure that all devices are able to access the web. With the proliferation of the mobile device and smart phones; it has become more important to ensure access to the web irrespective the type of device.
Web for Rich Interaction
The W3C Standards support and recognizes that the web was created as tool to share information and it has become more significant with the increasing demand for platforms such as Wikipedia and social networking platforms.
Web of Data and Services
Web is often viewed as a giant repository or data and information but it is also seen as a set of services which includes exchange of messages. The two views complement each other and how web is perceived depends on the application.
Web of Trust
Interaction on the web has increased and people ‘meet on the web’ and carry out commercial as well as social relationships. "W3C recognizes that trust is a social phenomenon, but technology design can foster trust and confidence.""[5]

[1]. Mission Statement for the IETF available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3935.txt

[2]. http://www.ietf.org/about/standards-process.html

[3]. http://www.ietf.org/about/standards-process.html

[4].http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission

[5].http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/internet-engineering-task-force

An Interview on Internet Governance with Professor Milton Mueller and Jeremy Malcolm

anirudh — 2013-11-12T10:14:58Z

Anirudh Sridhar interviewed Professor Milton Mueller from the Syracuse University School of Information and Jeremy Malcolm, an Information Technology and Intellectual Property Lawyer, regarding current issues and debates surrounding internet governance.

Q1: The extent to which civil society can participate at the proceedings of WCIT’12?

Professor Mueller: I did not attend WCIT-12. Civil society and industry were both influential in the process. CS created a great deal of critical publicity and leaked documents that had formerly been private. Industry and CS both lobbied governmental officials. (I was the first to leak an official ITU document, and this led to the creation of WCIT leaks by some friends of mine who took the idea much farther.)

Professor Malcolm: Actually I did not attend the WCIT’12 in Dubai. I did attend the WTPF in May, but was not permitted to speak. I did distribute a briefing paper by hand and managed to speak to a few delegates. I also contributed some talking points to an intervention by the representatives of the Informal Experts Group (IEG). Undoubtedly the work of the IEG was influential, and the civil society representatives were influential within that group, but the role of the IEG was poorly articulated and its procedures and relationship to the plenary WTPF were quite arbitrary.

Since then, the organization that I represent, Consumers International, has been granted sector membership status of the ITU-T and ITU-D with a waiver of fees, so that next time we will have the opportunity to speak at any meeting that is open to sector members. This is all well and good for us, less so for civil society organisations that do not have expertise in telecommunications and hence would find it more difficult to apply for sector membership.

Q2: What were the central debates at the WCIT’12 conference?

Professor Mueller: The central debates were: 1) the relevance of International Telecom Regulations to Internet governance, 2) the ETNO proposal to have quality of service charging 3) role of the ITRs in "security" 4) to which entity do the ITRs apply (Operating entities, recognized operating entities, etc.)

Professor Malcolm: Proposals that ITU Recommendations should have mandatory status; that it should expand its mandate to include ICTs as well as telecommunications; that it should take over Internet naming and numbering functions from ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers); and that Internet content hosts should share more of their revenue with the operators of telecommunications networks.

Q3: What were some good outcomes and what were some bad outcomes?

Professor Malcolm: None of these proposals succeeded, and not all even officially made it to the table. With the sustained opposition of the United States, Google and other powerful stakeholders, there was never any likelihood that they would.

What did make it through into the final treaty text are two provisions that, given that they are notionally responsible for the refusal of many countries to sign the ITRs, bear that responsibility like a dwarf wears a baggy suit. First, on security – it's worth setting this out in full:

Member States shall individually and collectively endeavor to ensure the security and robustness of international telecommunication networks in order to achieve effective use thereof and avoidance of technical harm thereto, as well as the harmonious development of international telecommunication services offered to the public.

And on spam:

Member States should endeavor to take necessary measures to prevent the propagation of unsolicited bulk electronic communications and minimize its impact on international telecommunication services. Member States are encouraged to cooperate in that sense.

The theory, though it taxes the imagination somewhat, is that these provisions could allow ITU members to justify constraints on Internet content, on the pretext that they are merely addressing security or spam. But the ITU already has work programs on security and spam, and ITU members in turn already heavily regulate these fields, without having an explicit mandate in the ITRs.

Q4: Is the fear of the ITU’s takeover of the internet real?

Professor Mueller:

There is no sudden UN or ITU effort to take over the Internet. There is, instead, a longstanding struggle between the Net and states at the national and international level. The WCIT is just the latest episode; and compared to WSIS, a minor one.

There is no evidence of any recent enlargement of the political support for states and inter-governmental institutions such as ITU. The same players are taking the same positions. There may even be erosion of support for inter-governmentalism, e.g. Brazil’s abandonment of CIRP.

The ITU is a paper tiger. Neither WSIS nor any other international development has strengthened or approved ITU efforts to gain control of pieces of the Internet since 1996.

Professor Malcolm: No: IN THE wake of the anti-climactic conclusion to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) earlier this month, readers could be forgiven for being confused about whether all the hype about the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) staging a UN takeover of the Internet had ever represented a real threat, or had just been a beat-up by special interest groups with an agenda to push.

Q5: Does the US, through ICANN exert too much unilateral influence on Internet Governance?

Professor Mueller: Off course. There are many examples of this. For example, the adoption worldwide of policies based on the DMCA and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, the seizure of domains registered to US-based registrars even if they are foreign-owned and do not infringe foreign law, and the linking of tough IP laws to trade concessions.

Professor Malcolm: Yes, the US exerts too much influence over ICANN, via the GAC and the IANA contract. WCIT (or more accurately, the ITU) is NOT the right track to solve this, because keeping the internet away from the ITU is one of the primary reasons the US exerts unilateral control. Any attempt to solve the problem via the ITU will fail.

Q6: Are there any serious alternatives to ICANN?

Professor Mueller: It is inconceivable that IGF will ever evolve into a body that negotiates binding treaties. Its entire mission and purpose is to be an alternative to that. It is also an extremely weak and poorly funded institution.

Professor Malcolm: There are no longer any alternatives to ICANN that anyone seriously thinks are better. The only argument that people are making nowadays is that oversight of ICANN should become multilateral. Nobody (no longer even the ITU) is seriously suggesting that any other body than ICANN should be making these decisions. At most, the GAC wants more say, but even the GAC is still part of ICANN.

Q7: Can we have a multi-stakeholder process that is truly democratic with legal force?

Professor Mueller: To reconcile legally binding authority with MS, you would need some dramatic institutional changes at the global level that would create new forms of representation. These new institutional forms would have to find some way to represent all the world's people and organizations, not states. Because states are unlikely to give up this power on their own, some kind of revolutionary action would be required to bring that about, roughly analogous to the democratic revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th century.

Professor Malcolm: In the far future, yes. In the near future no, but we still need to start talking about it, because the future starts from now. Mechanisms of multi-stakeholderism are still not well enough developed that they can substitute for the legitimacy of the nation state. But nation states do not properly overlap with those who are governed by transnational rules about the Internet, so eventually change must come.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/interview-with-milton-mueller-and-jeremy-malcolm

Bengali eSpeak Aids in Disaster Management

anirudh — 2013-11-07T09:21:07Z

Software developed on the eSpeak was deployed in Bangladesh and helped its citizens for disaster management.

The Bangla e-Speak text to speech synthesizer which was developed as part of a project funded by The Hans Foundation and executed by CIS in partnership with other partner organizations from the Daisy Forum of India was recently deployed in Bangladesh during cyclone Mahasen to read out messages which were sent during the emergency. A lot of organizations are working on TTS and their usefulness has already been established by Mahiti when they developed the Bangla Bol eSpeak. The text-to- speech (TTS) software is a very important technology for the visually impaired in that it gives a voice to text, enabling access to a whole host of information.[1]

Currently, a lot of proprietary TTS programmes are available like Balabolka, and Ultra Hal TTS reader but this TTS is an inexpensive alternative for the visually impaired.[2] This is because eSpeak is an open source compact software speech synthesizer. It is currently not available in many local Indian languages but it is possible to add new languages and even new dialects. The Bangla TTS project converted speech into Bengali.[3]

This programme was used in an innovative and useful way by applying it in disaster situations. In the case of a disaster, whether natural or national security related, the news media do not provide information in an accessible format. It is extremely important in these situations for the visually impaired to have clear access to ongoing events, get updates about things like rescue plans. The main work in order to be useful in these scenarios involved integrating national Geographic Information System (GIS), mobile phone networks and fax for the different stakeholders that need to interact before the disaster and for the responses after the disaster.[4]

The Bangla TTS was also integrated into the National Disaster Response system in Bangladesh, a country that is geographically vulnerable to many natural disasters like floods.

In order to integrate the TTS into the National Disaster Response system of Bangladesh, within the framework of the established philosophy, the entire disaster management system was built on an open-source stack. The automated bulk outward calling provision that was built for alerting people about an impending disaster had to broadcast the messages of which the text-to-voice conversion also had to be automated. During the process, many open source tools were tried but eSpeak was finally tried as it has a really low memory footprint and is very efficient for a large scale of operation. During the cyclone Mahasen, this proved decisive as the call volumes were very high and eSpeak scaled to meet the huge demand. All the pre-emptive alerts that were sent through the disaster management system were sent through this TTS. The programme helped a large size of the population and a diverse demographic. The Entire coastal Bangladeshi population benefited from the system. During the peak load, the system handled 27,000 calls, which shows that it has the capacity to deliver in the most difficult situations.

Mahiti,along with a partner in Bangladesh, was the organization responsible for developing this software. There are currently a few Bangla Text to Speech softwares on the internet like Kathak TTS but the Bangla Bol has some unique features.[5]

It’s an eSpeak Bangla language support which is open-source and is based on the”formant synthesis" method. This method enables the integration of many languages without modifying the underlying framework. It also enables language experts with even no programming knowledge to add or improve the language supported in eSpeak which is the most important feature of eSpeak. eSpeak was not just chosen because of its technical strengths, but also because it’s a part of a project to develop and integrate into a Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) open-source project which aims to enable computer desktop accessibility (screen reader functionality) to the blind. This is so that it can be used in many local Indian languages. Bangla was part of the first set of four languages that was completed by Mahiti (Hindi, Telugu and Malayalam were the remaining three). Therefore, while the far reaching consequences of the development work under this project being carried on in India to benefit its own marginalized populations and that of neighboring countries was never in doubt, this recent usage in Bangladesh adds fresh impetus to the work and underscores the criticality of this work.

[1]. Sen, Prasanjit. "Reading without Seeing: Mahiti's work on eSpeak." Mahiti Blog. Mahiti, 27 08 2013. Web. 2 Oct. 2013.

[2]. Alam, Firoj , and Mumit Khan. "Text To Speech for Bangla Language using Festival." BRAC University, Bangladesh . (2007): n. page. Web. 8 Oct. 2013.

[3]. Sen, Prasanjit. "Mahiti launches 'Bangla Bola' eSpeak (Bengali Speaking eSpeak) ." Mahiti Blog. Mahiti, 28 08 2013. Web. 2 Oct. 2013.

[4]. "Our Work- mproving National Disaster response."Mahiti.org. Mahiti, n.d. Web. 2 Oct 2013.

[5]. See footnote 2.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/bengali-e-speak-aids-in-disaster-management

A Hitchhikers Guide to the Cyberspace

anirudh — 2013-10-04T11:24:00Z

This blog post explores what authors of various stripes have to say about the digital sphere. Directly or indirectly, it looks at the commentary that authors provide on raging debates and contentions within the Digital Humanities.

John Irving, while giving a talk on the role of authors in American society remembered a quote: “Writers are the engineers of the human soul”. After rummaging through his memory for the source, he recollected that Joseph Stalin had said that right before executing 13 writers for espionage and treason. Jonathan Franzen and Azar Nafisi shared his opinion that writers are no longer given this kind of attention or importance, at least in American society.[1] There was a time in the 60’s and 70’s when American writers, unlike British writers at that time, were sought after as the leading public intellectuals and thinkers on issues even on the periphery of their immediate craft. The most plausible explanation of this curious double standard looked at America then as a young country that was still wondering what it was; a society of immigrants; Italians, Jews, Germans, Brits, or a country with an identity and a soul. Subliminally at least, they knew that it would be the writers that answered these questions.[2] On the other hand, England is the land of Shakespeare and they had already lived that process hundreds of years ago, and didn’t need telling who they are from writers. If America was in a youthful process of self-discovery requiring writers to countenance its soul until recently, then the new Digital World with its Digital Natives is certainly at an infant stage, still affected by the cutting edge of Freudian formation. Therefore, we must turn to our writers to tell us what this world is and who the people in it are.

The Digital Humanities claim to be a post structural, post gender, race, class space where the nondiscriminatory HTML, SGML and XML potentates are beyond racism, sexism and heteronormativism.[3] If the first claim is true, then the digital sphere can not only be understood as a changed society but as an avenue for social change. An impartial technological government can allow people to progress regardless of the identity that may have encumbered them outside its jurisdiction in the ‘real world’ which lends them agency in the real world nevertheless. If a Tamilian in 1975, frustrated with the Sinhalese medium schools decided to get an education elsewhere and moved back to Sri Lanka afterwards, then the Tamilian may be discriminated against but remains educated. The second claim made by the digital humanities goes further and states that a discussion about identity politics isn’t even desirable in the Digital Humanities. Ian Bogost writes that a blind focus on identity politics can divert from the technical nature of the field.[4] In fact, Stephen Ramsay divides the digital humanities into two categories: Digital Humanities 1 which deals with text encoding, archive creation and text analysis and Digital Humanities 2 which deals with the reaction of the humanities to a technical event horizon.[5]

Basically, that the group concerned with the technical aspect is distinct from the humanistic inquiry into cultural aspects that have something to do with the digital. Drawing upon this distinction, Rafael Alvarado says that the machine ought to be the horizon of interpretation and not the political as type 2 theorists claim. According to Hobbes, identity and politics are another kind of discourse emerging from a special kind of machine; society.[6] In this paper, I want to look at what writers in the age of the digital tell us about these individual claims of the digital humanities through their narratives.

Writers tell us about the world they inhabit not only from what they write about but how they write it. The much heralded multi-media experience of the future story and narratives is exemplified by the computer game form. Studying computer games are essential for understanding Digital Nativity because the modern cyber denizens glean much of their assumptions from game tutelage or at its least subliminal messaging.[7] My game savvy friend was recently telling me about why I should come gaming with him and he curiously said, “I’m not saying it’s amazing (though it is), but it’s inevitable”. Indeed, Sherry Turkle states about video games that “Video games are a window onto a new kind of intimacy with machines that is characteristic of the nascent computer culture. The special relationship that players form with video games has elements that are common to interactions with other kinds of computers...At the heart of the computer culture is the idea of constructed, “rulegoverned” worlds. I use the video game to begin a discussion of the computer culture as a culture of rules and simulation.”[8]

Games are not a just limp space where anything goes, but a place which, although time travel and interplanetary warfare is possible, is governed stringently by rules and thus form narratives that can inform and teach. They represent modern epistemic shifts and as Turkle states it, “Some of them begin to constitute a socialization into the computer culture: you interact with a program, you learn how to learn what it can do, you get used to assimilating large amounts of information about structure and strategy by interacting with a dynamic screen display. And when one game is mastered, there is thinking about how to generalize strategies to other games. There is learning how to learn.”[9]

In this paper, we are less interested in the narratives of early video games like Space War or Pong because of the cost and size of manufacture which made them very esoterically available or limited by the incipience of programming in general that defined the narrative. Pong basically consisted of a blip or a square ball (which was easier than having a round ball) that bounced back and forth on the screen that crudely resembled Ping Pong. Space War, on the other hand could be played only in research environments like MIT. The designers’ dream was to create visually appealing games that demand a diverse and challenging set of skills. Turkle encapsulates this goal when she says “the ambition is to have the appeal of Disneyland, pinball, and a Tolkien novel all at once.”[10]

Games such as Joust didn’t have the ability to engender an imaginative identification with characters like real narratives in literature do. They instead relied heavily on a common pool of fantasies about medieval characters that players would have.[11] Therefore, the games we should be looking at for narratives are unfettered virtual world video games that are usually Massive Multi-player Online Games (MMOG) that tell their own stories and are not dependant solely on the player’s imagination for narrative.

TuurGhys has studied 4 different historical strategy games that have such narratives that we can explore: Age of Empires, Empire Earth, Rise of Nations and Civilization IV.[12]

In these games, the hierarchical visual representations of the possible sequences of upgrades that the player can take (better known as the tech tree), seems to be a forced sequence in the narrative that the writer takes. Basically a technology tree is a structure that controls and enables progression from technology to better technology allowing the players also to obtain better facilities. In all of these games, technology is depicted in the narrative as the sole enabler and progenitor of social changes within the political landscapes and eras and civilizations are thus determined by the kinds of technology they use.[13] Rob Macdougall, having studied the Civilization 4 technology tree observes that “the Civtech tree offers a range of choices but is basically linear in the end, and the fact that you really need certain technologies to win the game makes it more linear still.” [14] Due to this seemingly inert yet subliminally charged historical pedagogy, Tuur comes to the conclusion that the writers in the genre facilitate change through hard technological determinism[15]

This messaging coming through from the narrative is important as it helps to understand the implications of its prevalence in such an influential medium. Tuur Ghys says, “Determinism is more than a pitfall in historical thinking, when embodied in a mechanism like a tech tree it can form a script that influences the design and content of popular culture.”[16]

Technological determinism that is narrated in these stories has many implications on the player’s understanding of social progress and by extension; the humanities. Sally Wyatt states that “Even if STS analysts look upon technological determinism as an inferior model, it should be studied and treated seriously because it is the common belief by most actors.”[17] In describing this phenomenon, Karl Marx, in “The Poverty of Philosophy” said "The Handmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist".[18]

The idea that technology develops suomotu, void from social forces is one aspect of technological determinism and other aspect is that technology regulates and is the organizing principle of society and social change. Technological determinists believe that societies lack the autonomy to change in accordance with their self interest and evolving moral consciousness. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul posits that technology, through the potency of its efficiency, works in a Darwinian process of technological selection.[19] Technology allows those social systems; morals and philosophies to advance that promote it, leaving the Luddite ideas to the ashen tray of history. This leads the people who get their assumptions about society from pop culture and especially these games to ascribe to the second claim of the Digital Humanities. In this line of thought, Bruno Latour attempts to restore the place of technology from the place of mere means to what he claims is its ontological dignity by describing the ways in which it forms detours in our final actions from our original intent.[20]

“Indeed, the routine of habit must not prevent us from recognizing that the initial action, this famous ‘plan’ which is supposed to stand in for the programme materialized by the simple implementation of technology, has deﬁnitely mutated. If we fail to recognize how much the use of a technique, however simple, has displaced, translated, modiﬁed, or inﬂected the initial intention, it is simply because we have changed the end in changing the means, and because, through a slipping of the will, we have begun to wish something quite else from what we at ﬁrst desired. If you want to keep your intentions straight, your plans inﬂexible, your programmes of action rigid, then do not pass through any form of technological life. The detour will translate, will betray, your most imperious desires.”[21]

Without technology, humans would be on a contemporary level with their actions and thus limited to their proximate interactions. Latour thus comes to the conclusion that “Technologies belong to the human world in a modality other than that of instrumentality, efﬁciency or materiality. A being that was artiﬁcially torn away from such a dwelling, from this technical cradle, could in no way be a moral being, since it would have ceased to be human – and, besides, it would for a long time have ceased to exist.”[22] Apart from possibly shutting down moral deliberation before the invention of a new technology, absolving us from any responsibility of the technologies we invent and being a self fulfilling prophecy in that this perception favours the ones making the new technology, this idea has another important consequence. The contention that technology arbitrates and facilitates individual moral decision making and society’s collective consciousness means that even in the digital realm, the horizon of consideration for the humanities should be defined by technology and not identity politics, thus vindicating Alvarado’s claim.

While geography and climate may have been the ancient factors, modern historical video games thus essentially posit that technology is now the raison d’être of social change. Taken to the logical extent of Civilization IV’s technology tree, [23] that mysticism leads to robotics and that the civics of the nation is unlocked by technology (Bronze working allows slavery) it marks a vindication of Stanley Kubrick’s nightmare vision of technology in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If technology, as these games claim, is one big HAL 9000, monitoring our urges, lobotomizing social movements then the humanities can no longer consider the digital space as a laboratory where social change is orchestrated. We can thus conclude that this narrative shows that the digital humanities cannot consider the digital space as an arena for identity politics to have its day, not because of critiques like Martha Nell Smith’s that the creators of tools bring in their philosophical stances and that the digital is dominated by English which is imperial in nature.[24] It is because technology will decide the nature of the arena and what will come into play there.

Let us now move to what more traditional narratives tell us about the digital space. Woody Allen, in the late 1970’s wrote a short story about a shy middle aged professor who longs for romance and finds a book into which you can be transported to any page.[25] The Professor, on choosing Madam Bovary enters Emma’s world and has a raging affair with her while simultaneously introducing us to an interactive novel. Michael Ende, the German novelist later wrote The Neverending Story which tells a similar story of a book called The Neverending Story, which was later adapted into many screenplays.[26]

One of the writers whom I’ve read who brings this narrative into his meta-narrative is Mark Danielewski. He engages in games of typography and layout in his first post-post modern novel ‘House of Leaves’ that is far outstripped by his latest Joycean riot; ‘Only Revolutions’.[27]

Though Joyce was a trickster and a prankster with his allegorical vortex, Ulysses, constantly subverting the implicit contract between the author, text and the reader, he did not possess the digital tools that Danielewski does. This novel tells the story of two characters, Sam and Hailey, whose stories have to be read in 8 pages each from front to back, back to front, up to down and upside down respectively. This architecture of a novel is only possible in the digital age. He writes two epic narrative poems of two individuals whose lives meet at the middle (literally) of the book and continue on their individual path, thus forcing the read to participate in the alienation of the characters. Danielewski set up a discussion board online before writing the novel where he asked his cult followers of ‘House of Leaves’ to tell him their favorite car, animals they respect and favorite historical events which he meticulously slipped into the final work.[28]

The question of where the novel ends and begins and where the writer ends and the reader begins is nebulous in this work. Danielewski seems to be showing us through his craft what ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ tried to tell us: We live in a constant flux between what is, what we want it to be and what will be. This narrative clearly tells us that technology can be subordinated for greater human participation in the digital realm. The idea that people can, and more importantly anyone can (regardless of their identity) participate in an online discussion thread and determine plot motifs and details while actively participating in the characters’ destinies moves us closer to the first claim of the digital humanities. This means that the digital realm can be an oasis for the stating of and thus the interpenetration of identity politics and a nexus for social change. Regnant in this narrative is the idea that though it depends on a technological event horizon (e-books, chat rooms etc), the change is determined less by technology and more by the hardware of the human brain and an operating system that makes the ioS7 look like a game of Pong; the human consciousness.

These conflicting visions of society, the humanities that countenance it and our role in shaping the future from different kinds of authors show us that we should be observing what they say very keenly. The digital humanities seem to exist in a primordial soup of pre-morphological uncertainty and the writers could be the involuntary torchbearers.

[1]. Monroe, Colin, dir. The Role of Writers in American Society. Perf. John Irving, Jonathan Franzen, and Azar Nafisi. Connecticut Forum Book CLub , 2011. Web. 30 Sep 2013.

[2]. Hughes, Mark. "Martin Amis: Britain doesn’t have enough respect for writers." Telegraph [London] 25 June 2012, n. pag. Web. 3 Sep. 2013. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9352559/Martin-Amis-Britain-doesnt-have-enough-respect-for-writers.html>.

[3]. Martha Nell Smith, “The Human Touch Software of the Highest Order: Revisiting Editing as Interpretation.” Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, 2(1):2007, 1-15.

[4]. Bogost, Ian. 11 05 2013. POSTCOLONIAL DIGITAL HUMANITIES, Online Posting to OPEN THREAD: THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES AS A HISTORICAL “REFUGE” FROM RACE /CLASS /GENDER /SEXUALITY /DISABILITY?

[5]. Ramsay, Stephen. "DH Types One and Two." Stephen Ramsay. Disqus, n. d. Web. 30 Sep. 2013.

[6]. Alvarez, Rafael. 12 05 2013. POSTCOLONIAL DIGITAL HUMANITIES, Online Posting to OPEN THREAD: THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES AS A HISTORICAL “REFUGE” FROM RACE /CLASS /GENDER /SEXUALITY/DISABILITY

[7]. Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. 64-92. eBook.

[8]. See note above.

[9]. See note 7 above.

[10]. See note 7 above.

[11]. See note 7 above.

[12]. Ghys, Tuur. "Technology Trees: Freedom and Determinism in Historical Strategy Games." Game Studies. 12.1 (2012): n. page. Web. 3 Sep. 2013.

[13]. See note 12 above.

[14]. MacDougall, Robert. "Technology Grows On Trees." Old is the New New. N.p., 18 03 2009. Web. 30 Sep. 2013.

[15]. See note 12 above.

[16]. See note 12 above.

[17]. Wyatt, Sally. Technological Determinism is Dead; Long Live Technological Determinism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. eBook.

[18]. Chandler, Daniel. Technological or Media Determinism.Aberystwyth: Aberystwyth University Press, 2000. Print.

[19]. See note 18 above.

[20]. Latour, Bruno. "Morality and Technology The End of the Means." Sage Journals. 19. (2002): 247-260. Web. 30 Sep. 2013.

[21]. See note 20 above.

[22]. See note 20 above.

[23]. See note 12 above.

[24]. See note 3 above.

[25]. See note 7 above.

[26]. Ende, Michael. The Never Ending Story. Dutton Children's Books, 1979. Print.

[27]. Poole, Steven. "O how clever." Guardian [London] 30 09 2006, n. pag.Web. 3 Sep. 2013.

[28]. See note 27 above.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/hitchhikers-guide-to-cyberspace